OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Spring 2020 | 1 From The Editor I am often asked how I ended up being a beer writer in South Africa. It’s a long story that involves meeting a Canadian on the rooftop of a budget hotel in Cairo, drinking some of the best homebrew I’ve ever had at the US army base in Seoul, and moving to Cape Town for one year almost a decade ago, serendipitously arriving just as the rst ripples of craft beer were being seen here. I’ve always loved a good origin story, and in this issue we’ve delved into the origins of South Africa's beer culture. Our focus on SA beer history was in part inspired by this year being the 200th anniversary of the Newlands Brewery. A whole book could be written on the brewing history of Cape Town’s wettest suburb, but for the moment you’ll have to make do with the feature on page 16. Once we’d cranked up our virtual DeLorean to travel back in time and explore Victorian beer culture, we decided not to stop with just one trip, packing enough proverbial plutonium to visit the early 1980s for the launch of South Africa’s oldest microbrewery, Mitchell’s (page 6), and then continuing through the 80s and 90s, wandering around the microbreweries that were way ahead of their time, closing before the term “craft beer” had actually been used in a South African setting. We haven’t just kept it local though, tipping our hats to global beer history with a look at some near-extinct beer styles on page 40 and asking our resident homebrew expert to recreate an ancient ale on page 49. When it comes to ancient beers though, there was only one that was going to be worthy of its own dedicated feature. Check out what it is on page 43. We nish o the issue by asking our readers their origin stories – what happened to make them the passionate beer lovers, homebrewers or professional brewers that they are today. And we’d love to hear your tales too, so drop us a line on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and let us know which beer turned you from an occasional imbiber into the kind of person that reads entire magazines dedicated to nothing but beer. Hopping through history Cheers! Lucy Corne EDITOR @LucyCorne